Tag Archives: Antarctica

Hurricane-force winds tilt slabs of ice, allowing the water beneath to freeze and forming the intriguing icy scales shown here, called “dragon skin” by the poetic. This striking image in a recent story caught my attention and I couldn’t resist adding it. Though I wish we could see the scale of the scales.

Hobart scientist Guy Williams said: “Dragon skin ice is very rare, bizarre, evidence of a darker chaos in the cryospheric realm, not seen in Antarctica since 2007.” So colourful: a “darker chaos.” Wow, I’m impressed. And uneasy. Surely this is caused by man-made climate change. Continue Reading →

Where is all that ice that is dissapearing [sic] from glaciers and land based ice sheets going to end up and why if the decline of glaciers and land based ice sheets is accelerating will sea level rise not accelerate with it?

Waves chase away warming

A paper has arrived from NIWA that says, in effect, warming is not necessary to explain the disappearance of much sea ice. That it removes a warming element from the polar pieces of the global warming puzzle gives me great pleasure. Well done, them!

I’m talking about “Storm-induced sea-ice breakup and the implications for ice extent” (Nature509, 604–7), published online in Nature on 29 May, by A.L. Kohout, M.J. Williams, S.M. Dean and M.H. Meylan (KWDM). Its major discovery is that large waves travel much farther through pack ice than hitherto realised, thus breaking up much more ice than we realised and allowing it to be swept away by wind and wave—it hasn’t been melting from the heat of global warming. Continue Reading →

If you have been following the story of the Akademik Shokalskiy, you’ll know it’s a global warming boat stuck in an Antarctic ice pack. What piqued my curiosity was that the expedition is called ‘Australasian’. Now, I don’t mind when Aussies make absolute fools of themselves, but when Kiwis are involved in the foolishness, I get brassed off. More so when the stupidity is funded by my taxes. Continue Reading →

For years we’ve been fed the propaganda that only warming causes less ice (and oh, what a shame!) and now we learn that it causes more ice as well (and oh, what a shame!).

Whether the warmists predict more ice or less ice, it’s still all caused by warming. Amazing.

More ice is bad, it’s caused by our evil kind of warming and our punishment is to give all our toys to the poor people living near the sea. Or far from the sea, so long as they’re poor. The old ice that sinks the earth’s crust into the magma which requires thousands of years to rebound after melting is not evil ice. But this ice is evil. Nor was that old ice caused by warming. But our evil ice is.

About two weeks after it was noised on various blogs and electronic news sources, and is old “news”, The Australian finally deigns to notice the record Antarctic sea-ice (I wonder whether the SMH and The Age will now me-too the story as well?). Leaving aside the wonderful headline, the article itself is a classic attempt to weasel out of accepting the obvious conclusion. The scientists involved really ARE shameless.

I entirely agree with him. This story presents a deplorable mish-mash of propaganda from a scientist who should be a lot better behaved. Be nice to see this covered in the Herald – or has it been – anyone know?

ANTARCTIC sea ice has expanded to cover the largest area recorded since satellite mapping began more than three decades ago, in stark contrast to this year’s record melt on the northern pole.

The expansion continues a trend of increasing Antarctic sea ice cover of about 1 per cent a decade and is at odds with predictions of climate change models that continue to forecast a long-term decline. Continue Reading →

Part of the mighty West Antarctic Ice Sheet, pinned to the continent by a series of mountains along the sheet’s ocean boundary. With an area of 2 million square km, it’s the size of Texas, 2.2 million cubic km, up to 14 km thick, weighs 1870 trillion tonnes and it’s crushing the crust of the Earth a full kilometre into the raw, molten mantle. This puppy’s going nowhere fast. Melt it? Hah. We could chuck our spare nuclear weapons at it and the ice would survive – though it’d make just the “coolest” firestorm.

A five-year study just published says methane hydrates buried under kilometres of Antarctic ice and sediment could accelerate global warming if released into the atmosphere. This has given the warmists much grist for their mills of alarm.

The paper contains some interesting information. The sediments are in surprisingly deep basins – down to 10 km or even 14 km in rifts (measured from the earth surface, not the top of the ice), although most are between 0.3 km and 3 km deep. That’s a lot of silt. The amount of overlying ice is similar, from 1 km to 3.5 km. That must all melt before the sediment has any hope of warming enough to release the methane clathrates. Chance would be a fine thing. Continue Reading →

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance wants to create the largest-ever marine reserve around most of Antarctica. Why? The Herald published an article the other day by Geoff Keey, outlining the main issues. He makes a couple of strange comments.

First, he says the Ross Sea is “likely to be one [of] the last places in the Southern Ocean to lose sea ice because of climate change, making it an important refuge for ice-dependent animals.”

But Keey must be unaware that the Antarctic continent has lost no sea ice to climate change or any other cause. On the contrary, it has been gradually cooling over 30 years of observations. So it may be an important refuge, but not because its capacity to provide a refuge is diminishing or even threatened. Continue Reading →

These people don’t know what’s happening on their own planet. The idea of locking up most of the Antarctic’s marine environment in what’s loosely called a “park” seems destined to kill a lot of the starving Third World.

Surely the idea is strictly for those who don’t like humans?

Never mind mineral resources that might be available down there, why stop all fishing activities? They grow back. Fish are the definition of a renewable resource.

If fishing practices need modifying, modify them, but don’t ban the harvesting of food. This strange call for a “massive Antarctic reserve” (what would it achieve?) was reported in the Herald today:

An Antarctic lobby group, backed by major conservation groups and celebrities, is calling for a massive marine reserve in the Ross Sea as part of an even bigger reserve surrounding Antarctica.

It would include a substantial proportion of New Zealand’s dependency area of the Ross Sea, extend out to 60 degrees south and be comparable to the area of Australia. Continue Reading →

Oh, it’s cooling all right

The NZ Herald has some great shots of Mr Emperor on the beach, taking in the sights and getting used to the adulation.

On the Google Earth clip at right you can see the shortest possible track he could have swum in reaching us from the nearest part of the Antarctic coast. It measures a mind-bending 3300 kilometres. Of course, it’s beyond question that he would have travelled far more than that, because of ocean currents.

Nice to see him here, but I hope he goes on his way soon, because there’s not much future for his kind in New Zealand. We’re not cooling that much.